This Startup Promises To Maximize Profit On Your Airbnb Posting

Wednesday

Jun 11, 2014 at 6:55 PM

Joey Cosco

With the surging popularity of apps like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, the sharing industry seems to have unlimited potential. Beyond Stays aims to figure out exactly what that potential is and capitalize on it.

Beyond Pricing is a new tool built by housing specialists and mathematicians. It claims it can find the optimal price to get as much bang out of your spare room as possible.

Users sign in to Beyond Stays' site with their Airbnb account and using its product Beyond Pricing it automatically analyzes "the health of your home," checks prices of local listings, and then continually updates your rates so your posting always has fresh prices. It's basically your virtual Airbnb broker.

Cofounder Ian McHenry said when Beyond Stays first began last November, the startup's first goal was general property management for Airbnb users. Quickly, McHenry and his cofounders realized that while cleaning and key exchanges are important, the real thing Airbnb users struggle with is pricing.

"It requires data, and it's a really specific skill if you want to do it well," McHenry told Business Insider.

Beyond sees revenue increases of as much as 40% from some properties, eight times as much as McHenry saw when he worked for a similar service in the hotel industry. Still, he maintains Beyond doesn't only drive prices up; it also fixes cases where people overvalue their own homes simply because they're emotionally attached to their own property.

The cofounder said focusing on prices gave Beyond Stays a much more scalable business: creating algorithms to optimize prices.

"We already have people signed up in every major metro across the globe. You can't do that when you're managing cleaning," McHenry said.

Each city requires its own algorithms to accommodate events like conferences, concerts, and sports. He said often these factors aren't so intuitive. For example, this weekend's American Diabetes Association Conference in San Francisco has affected prices much more than last week's World Wide Developer Conference.

"The sharing economy is just something that brings more individuals and small businesses into the market," McHenry said. "There's so much you can do to help them run their little micro businesses better."

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